Lamps and lights are highly desirable for being mounted adjacent to front doors to homes and businesses which are spaced away from building addresses. Traditional lamps and lights usually include a lantern mounted by and separated from the exterior of the building by an arm. Other types of popular lights have included lanterns, and the like that are suspended by rods, wires, chains, and the like. While popular and traditional, these lights and lanterns do not directly illuminate the building addresses. Thus, during night-time conditions and during bad weather, a building address is not clearly readable by traditional and popular hanging and mounted lights and lanterns.
Attempts have been made to try to illuminate addresses with a hanging lamp. See for example, U.S. Pat. No. Des. 118,738 to Herring. However, such as hanging light would have other readable problems since the light must be hung quite high above a doorway so that pedestrian traffic does not knock into the hanging light. Additionally, the Herring lamp does not work when there is not an overhang above the doorway on which to mount the hanging light.
Various types of lighted address signs have also been proposed over the years. See for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,668,799 to Bergan; 4,611,265 to Davis; 4,937,499 to Hunte; 5,025,355 to Harwood; 5,729,924 to Reading; 5,797,673 to Logan et al.; 5,911,524 to Wilton; 5,832,642 to Dalton; 6,629,766 to Cathel, 6,658,774 to Munter et al.; and 6,745,507 to Golding.
However, these signs generally illuminate the building address numbers, but fail to illuminate a doorway. Thus, these address signs fail to function as porch lights. Additionally, these address signs are not aesthetically pleasing and instead are no more than generally unattractive rectangular type boxes. These box sings must also require separate mounting hardware for mounting somewhere around the front wall of the building. Often there is not much space to mount such signs. Additionally, these illuminated box signs would require additional electrical hook ups that add to their expense and further undesirability.
Thus, the need exists for solutions to the above problems with the prior art.